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DOI: 10.1177/1470412907075065 2007 6: 13Journal of Visual Culture

Gary ShapiroThe Absent Image: Ekphrasis and the `Infinite Relation' of Translation

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journal of visual culture

The Absent Image: Ekphrasis and the Infinite Relation of Translation

Gary Shapiro

journal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com]Copyright 2007 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)Vol 6(1): 1324 [1470-4129(200704)6:1]10.1177/1470412907075065

AbstractEkphrasis, the verbal description of a visual work, is a crucial site forunderstanding what Foucault calls the infinite relation betweenseeing and saying. This article sketches a selective history of the genre,from Homer through Derrida and Lyotard, oriented to the question ofthis gap, and focused on the structural necessity of the absence of theimage. This reading shows that Derrida and some other recent Frenchthinkers have been mischaracterized as linguistic reductionists.

Keywordsabsence dialogue ekphrasis image language translation voice

Words will never be the equivalent of visual images, and images will neverspeak (unless they incorporate words or codes). Yet in our increasinglyimage-driven time we continue to speak and write about the visual at thesame time that we acknowledge, lament, celebrate or exploit the gapbetween what is seen and what can be said. In the course of his controversialekphrasis of Las Meninas, Foucault (1970[1966]) interrupts himself tocomment on his own procedure, saying that the relation of language topainting is an infinite relationship . . . it is in vain that we say what wesee; what we see never resides in what we say (p. 9). Foucaults criticsmight have paused over this sentence and others, which make it clear thathe is offering much more than a description of a painting; he proposes ananalysis of the relationship between words and images, and so of thegenre of ekphrasis itself. What is seeing? What is saying? What is the infiniterelationship?

Foucault asks questions here, rather than claiming or presupposing, asrecent critics such as Martin Jay (1993) suppose, that the visual is reducible

to the linguistic or textual (pp. 3834). Jay takes Foucaults account of JeremyBenthams Panopticon to be a sign of his condemnation of vision as such, notseeing its place within a complex body of thought that is structured (as GillesDeleuze, 1988[1986], perspicuously points out) by the parallel realms ofvisibility and discursivity; these are both understood as historically (orarchaeologically) variable and capable of a variety of chiasmatic crossings(pp. 4969). Jay (1993) proceeds to argue that not only Foucault but almostall major French thinkers of the 20th century are deeply suspicious of thevisual, that they have an evil eye with regard to vision, which theysupposedly see as always and necessarily suspect: suspect politically for itspanopticism, epistemologically for its supposing a detached, disembodied,imperial eye and, with respect to sexual difference, as hopelessly implicatedwith the gendered, desiring subject of the male gaze.

It is true that Foucaults analysis of the Panopticon is certainly informed by aknowledge of the evil eye tradition (addressed by 20th-century anthropol-ogy but previously by Nietzsche, who was surely one of Foucaults majorsources here). But it is not the case that Foucault has an evil eye for vision.Quite the contrary, as is demonstrated by his writings on painters andphotographers including Velazquez, Manet, Klee, Magritte, Warhol andcontemporary French painters like Fromanger and Rebeyrolle (Shapiro,2003). And he was exuberant about the jouissance of participating in thewaves of energy that go through a group in a gallery even when viewing thework of such a kitsch painter as Clovis Trouille (Foucault, 1994[195488]:2.7047). This evidence does not, by itself, speak directly to the point ofwhether Foucault was a linguistic reductionist; someone might say that theseartists were simply grist for the reductive mill. However, he did consistentlyattempt to think the difference and the possible crossings or chiasms of thevisual and verbal, as his important line about the infinite relation indicates.

I am going to try to show that some of the leading French philosophers whohave written about the visual in the last 30 years or so, Foucault, Derrida andLyotard, are best understood not as enemies of the visual but as thinkers ofthe infinite relation that both imposes the necessity of translation andrenders it impossible. To think this relation is to say not only that everytranslation of the visual is unfaithful to the original, but with Borges(1999[192236]) that the original is unfaithful to the translation (p. 239).

I want to make my point by way of a narrative of the ekphrasis tradition thatfocuses on that infinite relation, gap, scission, or point of difference, whatFoucault (1967[1966]) calls an cart, between seeing and saying (p. 26). Mynarrative will by necessity be highly selective and may appear idiosyncratic. Iwill focus on writers and texts that revolve around the very split betweenimage and text, the visual and the verbal. The cart is most obvious when atext dwells on the very absence of or the dimension of absence in the workthat it addresses. For the texts that I am cataloguing here (concluding withthe French thinkers) this absence is not an obstacle but that which enablesekphrasis. More specifically, there is an argument, sometimes implicit to besure, that the situation of the absent image is not simply a peculiarity, a

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marginal or eccentric case, with respect to normal descriptive practice. Allekphrasis must share this structure, a point developed most explicitly,perhaps, in Derridas Memoirs of the Blind (1993[1990]), about which morelater.

Consider the oldest and most canonical description of a visual work of art inthe Western tradition, Homers account of the shield of Achilles in Book 18of the Iliad. This passage was famously explicated by Lessing (1962[1766])in his attempted demonstration of the distinct spheres of painting andpoetry, became the subject of a complex and extended commentary by thegreat translator Alexander Pope, and is more recently the subject of a seriesof paintings by Cy Twombly, which can be considered as new visual trans-lations (not devoid of language). Pope (1967[170935]) felt the need toamplify his translation of Homers translation (ekphrasis) of the shield bycommenting on Flaxmans reconstruction. He struggled with the notoriousquestion of how to represent figures in motion and changing scenes in amotionless image (pp. 35870). Twombly exploits his own dyslexia, trans-lating the text of Homers ekphrasis into a chiasmatic encounter of scrawls,isolated Greek names and graffitiesque hints of figuration. The ultimatetheme of his Shield is the absence of Homers world, of the necessity andimpossibility of making sense of Greece (and so of tradition).

Translation across the gap is always a scrawl. One striking anomaly stemsfrom the legend that the poet of this ekphrasis was blind. So our oldest andmost venerated verbal account of a visual work is that of an impossible objectby a man who could not see (the shield is impossible because the descriptionrequires that it be animated and moving). Rather than dismissing this as anincongruity, we ought to take the fact of absence as something to be exploredand its meaning articulated.

The practice of verbal description of the visual came into being because theobjects were not visible to the reader or listener. Even now it is not possibleto write and to look at the same time, another form of Foucaults infiniterelation. It is this blindness that Robert Morris (1994) explores from anotherperspective (a non-seeing perspective, if I may verge on catachresis) in hisseries of blind drawings to accompany short philosophical texts by DonaldDavidson on language and knowledge (pp. 4449, 296301). In Memoirs ofthe Blind, Derrida (1993[1990]) argues that this blindness insinuates itselfinto every act of drawing, which necessarily proceeds in the absence oflooking, as an interruption of sight.

Foucault explored the divergence in another context with his explication ofMagritte in This Is Not a Pipe (1983[1968]). He suggested that this image(whose actual title is Les deux mystres) is an unraveled calligram, atranslation of language exhibiting itself in its capacity of constituting animage while yet exhibiting its very difference from that image. His ekphrasisraises the question of how the infinite relation obtains in a work that beginsto write its own commentary. This explication of the floating pipe whoseidentity is denied by the inscription below was perhaps inspired byNietzsches transfiguration of Raphaels Transfiguration in The Birth of

Shapiro The Absent Image 15

Tragedy. There Nietzsche describes this last work of Raphael, with itsdoubled action, based on the amalgamation of two distinct scenes fromGospel narrative, by obliterating the name of Jesus from the textual source,speaking of the luminous floating figure as the radiant Apollo, bringer ofbeautiful dreams, a translation to which the original is not adequate.Nietzsche (1999[1871]) effectively adapts and rewrites the description inBurckhardts Cicerone, which he used faithfully according to its title. Heeffectively retitles the painting This Is Not a Christ, and providesFoucault with a model for his analysis of another anomalous floatingobject (p. 26).

From the beginning then, so far as there is a beginning of that which isnecessarily doubled and has no simple origin, the tradition of ekphrasis hasshared in this structural duality. It is recounted, for example, that whenApelles journeyed to Rhodes to pay his respects to Protogenes and found himaway from his studio, he left as his calling card a very fine line on a panelprepared for painting. Protogenes, recognizing this as the hand of Apelles,responded by inscribing a still finer line over that one; but Apelles, returningto find his colleague and rival absent once more, replied with a yet moredelicate line that drew an admission of defeat from his rival (Pliny, 1968[c. 50CE]: Book XXXV, 813). Pliny notes that the painting was destroyed by firebefore his own time, after being much admired for its play of barely visiblelines. From his account, it is impossible to tell whether these lines werestraight, curved or wavy (could the final work have been a layered scrawl?).Altogether this is a story of absences: the empty studio, lines diminishingtoward and almost past the threshold of visibility, and a work thatdisappeared before the historian could see it. From our perspective, Plinymight be seen as adding a new wrinkle to the agon, substituting a work ofconceptual art for the vanished original, or replacing the latter with a text.

The Imagines of Philostratus the Elder (1931[c. 200 CE]) constitute therichest collection of rhetorical descriptions of ancient painting, althoughdebate continues as to whether the objects of these ekphrases were actual orfictive. A deeper perspective on this discussion will proceed by asking howPhilostratus writing attempts to mimic features of painting such as thelayering of paint, or highlighting and shadow, and how it sometimes playswith reducing painting to text, as when the commentary on a painted scenefrom Homer reads the image as something like a performance of or a criticalgloss on a piece of writing. Philostratus was working with a subtle andcomplex rhetorical tradition; in deploying that tradition, he raises questionsabout the presumed absolute immediacy and evidence of the visual. Thewriters contest with painting is carried out not only in his attempt to evokeimages as vivid as the artists, but at the level of questioning the priority ofthe original. In one ekphrasis (Hunters, number 28) he goes far beyond theelements in the putative painting, describing a raging boar that could notappear yet in the work, whether imagined or actual; he cries out to the youngmen in the scene to warn them of the danger (p. 109). At this point, heapologizes for being carried away by his own rhetoric, for having forgottenthat the scene was only a picture. Yet for readers of this text there is a second,

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framing effect; for if readers have been enthralled by Philostratusinterpellation of the youths, they have forgotten that for them there is noteven a painting present.

The hypertrophy and summa of the ancient tradition is found in FranciscusJunius The Painting of the Ancients (1991[1638]). This text, enormouslyinfluential in its time (serious readers included Rubens, Van Dyck, andpossibly Rembrandt) aims at a totalistic presentation of the ancient tradition.It supposes that a comprehensive theory of painting, with implications forcurrent practice, can be offered on the basis of almost exclusively literaryevidence. With the works either destroyed, unavailable, or possibly imaginaryto begin with, Junius exhibits the apparent paradox (like Homer with theshield) of using the very absence of the original as a spur to artisticproduction. Junius in effect argued for a reversal of ut picture poesis; in hisphilologically oriented metatheory poetic and painterly phantasy are twovarieties of the same thing, so that painters can learn pictorial invention fromOvid, one of Junius prime examples (Dundas, 1996). This position enableshis own program of providing inspiration to painters because the text canfunction in the absence of the image (and such views, not limited to Junius,played into the great 17th-century proliferation of paintings of scenes fromOvid, like those dim pictures on the back wall in Las Meninas.)

None of these tangential and questionable relations to the visible interferedwith the remarkable resurgence of interest in these ancient texts from the15th century on. The rediscovery of learning was accompanied by somearchitectural discoveries, like that of the Laocoon, but the quest for originsflourished independently of any requirement to ground the account ofpainting in actual visual experience; it is a wonderful example of that returnand retreat of the origin of which Foucault wrote. The project of finding anabsolute origin founders; each candidate for this status is eventually revealedto be unsatisfactory and so the quest increasingly appears as impossible ofcompletion (Foucault, 1970[1966]: 32835). The confluence of sovereignpolitical power with the abilities of the artistic genius (a notion found in theancient treatises, especially those like Plinys which dwell on the relationbetween Alexander and Apelles, but exaggerated in the age of absolutemonarchy) was clearly an appealing theme for 17th-century painters (whocould use Junius encyclopedic work as a handy reference). Think ofVelazquez, the court painter, whose Las Meninas is typically discussed interms of the artists struggle to be recognized as the practitioner of a fine art;the mark of his recognition, the cross of Saint James was supposedly addedto his image by Philip IV. The desire operative in a program like that of Juniuscould easily override the absence of supporting documentation, and indeedthe inflation of artistic sovereignty was doubtless easier in such a contextwhere reputation could not be checked by extant works in their particularityand imperfection.

In the late 18th century, the project of ekphrasis takes a further step whencertain writers incorporate a more explicit reflection on the fact that theirdescriptions must function in the absence of the image. Rather than

Shapiro The Absent Image 17

overestimate the power of their words and the ability of language to simulateor substitute for the visual, these texts at least implicitly admit their ownincapacity. The inflation of the older texts is replaced by irony and indi-rection. Ekphrasis becomes radically perspectival, ironically acknowledgingthat there can be no masterful voice to lead us through the virtual gallerywith true authority.

Diderots Salons constitute the best known and most influential writing ofthis sort. Prepared for the very limited and closed circulation of GrimmsCorrespondance littraire, these reports were distributed to those whowould probably not see the originals. The rhetoric attempts to incorporateand comment on the inevitable distance between writer and artwork. Ratherthan adopting Philostratus model of master and pupil, Diderots style tendstoward the conversational and dialogical, experimenting with a variety ofgenres and tropes. The result, as Thomas Crow says, is an extraordinarymodel of non-hierarchical thinking (Diderot, 1995[1751]: 1. xix). If thefiction of a single voice speaking from the position of an ideal visualimmersion, a total knowledge of the works, and an unshaken confidence inthe power of language to convey what is seen cannot be maintained, then aplurality of voices and a continuous variation of dramatic and narrativesituations in the discourse will alert the reader to the aporias of the relationbetween speech and image. Despite these differences, one way that Diderotcontinues the form set by Philostratus is in his frequent construction of animaginary speech or dialogue; what we have are not simply reports by adetached observer, but interchanges with interlocutors.

In his celebrated essay on Greuzes Young Girl Crying Over Her Dead Bird(Salon of 1765), Diderot (1995[1751]) creates a conversation betweenhimself and the girl, but also, intersecting with it, between himself andanother more detached viewer who he says is laughing at [him], making funof a serious person who amuses himself by consoling a painted child forhaving lost her bird, for having lost what you will (p. 1.99). The possibilityof an indefinite expansion of conversational partners does not intensify theillusion that we are in the presence of the painting, but does make us reflecton the difficulties of representation. The Salons constitute not only aphilosophical dialogue on painting, but a dialogue with philosophy.

The essay on Fragonards The High Priest Corsus Sacrificing Himself to SaveCallirho begins with the confession its impossible for me to talk to youabout this painting, but then proceeds to do just that indirectly, as Diderotrelates a very strange vision modeled on Platos myth of the cave, in which avariety of scenes appear to him, some resembling the painting. The visionitself is interrupted and commented on in a dialogue with Grimm, who mustremind Diderot that he has seen only apparitions, not the painting itself (p.1.147). In this complex revision of Platos hierarchy of form, physical objectand visual imitation (Republic X), the painting will occasionally slip into theplace of the ordinary object which is known in fragmentary or distorted formthrough phantasms or imitations. For Plato, the form was invisible to the eye;in Diderots text, even the painting becomes a vanishing object.

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August Schlegels dialogue Die Gemlde (1996[1799]) bears a relationship tothe art world of Dresden, analogous to that which links Diderots writing tothe Paris Salons. Apparently following an inspiration from the French writer,Schlegel composes a dialogue, one in which the standpoints of critic, artistand cultivated amateur, as well as the gendered differences of male andfemale all come into play, in order to suggest that a multiplicity of voices andperspectives is a more authentic way of dealing with the distance betweenoriginal and verbal description than is the fiction of a unique authoritativemaster. The dialogue is not enacted in the gallery, where we might at leastimagine the speakers in the presence of the paintings, but outdoors, whilethe view of the paintings is replaced by the famous view of Dresden acrossthe Elbe, from the terrace of Europe; the fiction of being in the presence ofthe art work is replaced by an explicit reliance on memories and judgmentsformed by past viewing. Absence is structurally marked by the very terms ofthe dialogue.

The implicit epistemology of the Salons constitutes an alternative to theempiricism and realism of the time (Locke, Hume, Reid) and can now beread in the light of Nietzsches perspectivism and Richard Rortys conceptionof philosophy as conversation. In the wake of Kants critique of rationalismand empiricism (and of their aesthetic analogues in his Critique ofJudgment), Schlegel enacts a conversation about matters of taste thatimplicitly engages with Kants attempt to resolve what he calls the antinomyof taste. While the dialogue holds open the possibility of the conversationcontinuing (as in Kants idea that taste is a subject amenable to infinitediscussion), it also raises questions about whether such differences as thosebetween sculptor and critic, or man and woman within the dominantEuropean classes, can yield to the universalizing tendencies of the Kantianjudgement of taste. The conversation, and so the impossible project oftranslation, is intrinsically open-ended. The Dresden Gallery, provocationfor so many literary and philosophical meditations on painting, is one poleof Foucaults infinite relation. At the crest of the 18th-centurys invention ofaesthetics and its discovery of the romantic religion of art, Die Gemlde is asubtle proleptic and apotropaic attempt to ward off a monological discourseof art, either in the manner of Hegels idealism or in the form of a reductivepositivism.

Some allege that writers like Derrida, Foucault and other French post-structuralists (for want of a better term) reduce all experience to that of thelinguistic text, in a narrow sense of text. I propose that their exemplarywritings on the visual should be read as further explorations of the necessarydistance in the translation (in one direction or the other) of word and image.In Derridas long polylogue for n+1 female voices entitled Restitutions ofthe Truth in Painting (Pointure) (1987[1978]) he orchestrates an explorationof the analyses of Van Goghs painting of two shoes by the philosopherMartin Heidegger and the art historian Meyer Schapiro. As if responding tothe claim that Derridas work involves a form of linguistic reductionism,these voices charge that the two thinkers are attempting to return the workto an extra-painterly subject (the one who walks in those shoes), ignoring the

Shapiro The Absent Image 19

pictural restance or remainder that evades the work of attribution. Theekphrastic strategies of the historian and the thinker naively presuppose amastery of the image, even more naively than Philostratus gallery guide, whoacknowledges a conversational context and steps back from some of his ownexcesses. Several interventions from the unnamed voices periodically pointout that the philosopher and the art historian have not noticed that the shoesdo not even appear to be a pair (they look like two left shoes), and so cannotbe returned to a single subject. Derrida demonstrates the tendency ofekphrastic speakers to engulf the painting with their own projectedmeanings. The polylogue forestalls any assumption of languages priorityover painting; it questions the viability of any monological exposition of apaintings meaning (and so also interrogates the singular intensity of themale gaze). The lapidary definition of deconstruction, always more thanone language, suggests that ekphrasis is most true to its vocation whenrenouncing the illusion of a single, authoritative voice.

In The Truth in Painting, Derrida is repeatedly, pointedly, and specificallysuspicious of what he sees as the tendency of traditional philosophicalaesthetics to subordinate the visual or spatial arts to language, a tendencythat he sees magnified in hierarchical classifications of the arts, like those ofHegel and Heidegger, which make poetry the premier form of art. Hesuspects that there is a collusion between traditional questions like what isthe meaning of art? and such hierarchical classifications. So he suggests that

when a philosopher repeats this question without transforming it,without destroying it in its form, its question-form, its onto-interrogative structure, he has already subjected the whole of space tothe discursive arts, to voice and the logos . . . (p. 22)

So Derrida questions and explores what he sees as the linguistic imperialismof two representative thinkers, Heidegger and Meyer Schapiro, as they speakabout an apparently simple painting of two shoes by Van Gogh. Heideggerseems to fall into the naivet of conventional ekphrasis when he says thispainting spoke, in revealing the world and the earth of a peasant womanwho wears this pair of shoes, and Meyer Schapiro responded in kind byarguing that the shoes were those of the urban artist, Van Gogh. The point ofDerridas polylogue, then, is not to argue for yet a third interpretation of thepainting, or to say that its meaning is radically indeterminate, but to ask whatwe are doing when we think we are verbalizing a visual work. The dialogueor polylogue form contributes to this inquiry by avoiding the institution of amaster voice or discourse.

The themes of plurivocity and absence are articulated further in DerridasMemoirs of the Blind (1993[1990]). In dialogue form it is argued that theartist is necessarily blind in a certain sense, insofar as he cannot simul-taneously see the model and draw or paint. The Memoirs highlights thepersona of the writer, an inescapable but typically sublimated aspect oftraditional ekphrasis. Here there is a primary speaker who corresponds to

20 journal of visual culture 6(1)

the author and personality, Jacques Derrida, the one who confesses his ownoptical disorders and partial blindness (a facial paralysis disabling normal eyefunctions, and tears that overwhelm sight). Nietzsches question now thatGod is dead, who is speaking? which might always have been asked of theekphrastic genre acquires a new force, as in Right of Inspection(1998[1989]), where Derrida orchestrates a polylogue around a photo-graphic series that raises questions of sexual difference.

Finally, I want to consider the case of Jean-Franois Lyotard by focusing onthe series of dialogues titled Que peindre? (1987), which develops thisquestion in relation to Adami Arakawa Buren (whose work Lyotard namesin his subtitle). For some time, as in Discours, figure (1985[1971]), he hadargued that the figural and linguistic dimensions are mutually irreducible toone another and must be understood in terms of their chiasmatic inter-changes. In a reading of Freud, Lyotard maintains (contrary to Lacan) that thedream is much more than a verbal artifact; he stresses the ways in which thefigural interrupts the dreams discursive element (pp. 23970). As hesuggests in The Differend (1988[1983]) it is phrasing itself which is the issueof philosophy: how does one speak or respond to a discourse or significationthat is radically different from ones own, one that may contest the claims andorientation of ones own form of utterance? More specifically, ek-phrasisconfronts the question: how can we phrase or respond to that which is muteand apparently beyond language? The dialogues of Que peindre? concern thepossibility of speaking in the presence of the visual.

Presence has itself been a suspect notion in much post-structuralistthought, and the way in which I initially posed the question of presence andabsence is indebted to that theorizing. Lyotards dialogues take cognizance ofthis issue by exploring the work of three artists who seem to abandon thepursuit of traditional painterly presence, yet whose work can be understood(through dialogue) to reinstate some of its values. Adami appears to reducethe image to a minimal, cartoon-like shorthand; the works of Arakawa thatenter into the discussion generally contain stenciled lettering, geometricfigures, and faint lines or tracings; Burens painting consists of regularstripes of two alternating colors that frame, mark, ornament, or (some mightsay) disfigure a variety of public spaces. All three projects might appear to bewell on the way to translating painting into a code of standardized image(Adami), or pedagogic puzzles and riddles (Arakawa), or decorative border(Buren). Space does not allow the close reading of the series of dialoguesdevoted to these painters that they richly deserve. But something can be saidabout the initial framing dialogue that indicates their strategy.

In the opening dialogue readers are seduced into an initial identificationwith the philosophically sophisticated critic of presence, known as You,who find themselves in conversation with someone identified only as Him,who seems committed to a nostalgic defense of presence. You, reader, aretempted to adopt this concise compendium of reasons for rejecting thatlonging for presence:

Shapiro The Absent Image 21

I maintain that presence escapes, whichever bit you think youve caughtit by. That it can only be apprehended as deferred . . . On reflection theleast glance (coup doeil) appears laden with presuppositions, withthose undertones that should be called underseens, leaving out ofaccount the physical, physiological, socio-cultural traditions whichmake the glance possible. How can painting offer an object to theglance without taking into consideration all the things the gaze (regard)is expecting? Immediate presence in one brushstroke of color hideswhole worlds of mediations, which the painter who makes it cannotignore, unless hes a dauber. (Lyotard, 1991[1887]: 11)

You has begun to describe the works of Adami, Arakawa and Buren. Doesthe fact that the questions that arise here must be approached only throughtalk, through dialogue and phrasing, already settle the issue on the side oflanguage? Thats what You think. You cite Hegels view that todaycommentary on a work is a part of that work and argue from the way inwhich the painters use, write, or refer to supplementary material that thecommentary spreads into the work from everywhere and supports it when itdoesnt replace it (pp. 1718). But Him doesnt agree that this settles thequestion of presence. So far as the Hegelian or quasi-Hegelian narrative thatsees art as relentlessly turning into nothing but a commentary on itself goes,Him challenges the view that anything has changed, fundamentally since thedays of Altamira and Lascaux: Painting has always been enveloped inthousands of phrases, which were always reflexive, even if they werentalways critical (p. 18). All that has changed is that now the artist producesthese phrases, along with the critic and the philosopher. This is only adifference in the distribution of social roles, not a sign that presence hasdisappeared from art. If artists perform their own translations this does notsay anything about the success or completeness of those translations; theinfinite relation between language and painting can obtain within anysingle persons perspective. The alternation of voices that constitutesLyotards dialogues marks the interruption of thought and language. Theform reminds us that there is no unique perspective on the work of art. Thequestions that each of the speakers has for the other(s) some dialogueshave more than two participants prevent the construction of any mono-logical illusion. The opposition between Yous suspicion of presence, basedon a notion of the inescapability of language, and Hims attempt to defend,evoke and describe that presence is not really settled. They might go onforever. Their interchange exemplifies the interweaving and occasionalconflict of the linguistic and the visible, and this tips the balance in favor ofHim, who defines presence in terms of its power of interruption. Translationis an infinite relation.

Acknowledgement

I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Clark Art Institute which enabled me towork on this study.

22 journal of visual culture 6(1)

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Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Lyotard, Jean-Franois (1991[1987]) Presence, in Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (eds)

The Language of Art History (partial translation of Lyotard, 1987). Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

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Shapiro The Absent Image 23

Gary Shapiro is Tucker-Boatwright Professor in the HumanitiesPhilosophyat the University of Richmond. He is the author of Archaeologies of Vision:Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (Chicago University Press,2003), Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art After Babel (CaliforniaUniversity Press, 1995), Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gifts, Noise, and Women(State University of New York Press, 1991) and Nietzschean Narratives(Indiana University Press, 1989). Gary Shapiros current work focuses ongeophilosophy and geoaesthetics.

Address: Department of Philosophy, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA23173, USA. [email: gshapiro@richmond.edu]

24 journal of visual culture 6(1)